I heard Dr. Francis Collins speak last night at the ASA annual meeting here in DC. For those who don’t know, Francis he is the former director of the NIH and served as such under several Presidents including Trump. He also led Operation Warp speed during COVID. He is also well known as a an atheist turned progressive Christian.
His talk last night went through several tools he is introducing in his upcoming book “The Road to Wisdom”. One of his tools is a web of bias used with the organization Braver Angels.
I got to talk one on one with Francis and mentioned Bart, who he said he knew.
As humans, our evolution is at stake with all the vitriol against each other. It would be amazing if leaders like Bart, Francis and others would spend time together walking through and discussing differences. It would help human evolution move forward and those of us seeing leaders have strong disagreements but support common causes and interests for the flourishing of all mankind.
Here is Francis’s web bias chart.
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If I remember the idea of a web of belief goes back to Quine. His point was that there are no fixed and given data: you can incorporate any new fact into your web of belief (without contradiction) if you are willing to make the necessary modifications to that web.
Perhaps the inability to incorporate new facts by making modifications is as good a definition of fundamentalism as any. But this gets to the issue of core beliefs. The more central to our self-concept a belief is, the harder to modify without trauma. And sometimes the cleaner comes along with a broom and sweeps the whole web away.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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